concern, would be willing to
trust his interest or would really expect the people, all the people as
a whole, to be represented or to get what they wanted, to act definitely
and efficiently through the vague generalizations of the polls. Perhaps
a natural selection, a dead-earnest rigorous, selection that men work
on nine hours a day, an implacable, unremitting process during working
hours, of sorting men out (which we call business), is the crowd's most
reliable way of registering what it definitely thinks about the men it
wants to represent it. Business is the crowd's, big, serious, daily
voting in pounds, shillings, and pence--its hour to hour, unceasing,
intimate, detailed labour in picking men out, in putting at the top the
men it can work with best, the men who most express it, who have the
most genius to serve crowds, to reveal to crowds their own minds, and
supply to them what they want.

As full as it is--like all broad, honest expressions, of human
shortcomings and of things that are soon to be stopped, it does remain
to be said that business, in a huge, rough way, daily expressing the
crowds as far as they have got--the best in them and the worst in them,
is, after all, their most faithful and true record, their handwriting.
Business is the crowds' autograph--its huge, slow, clumsy signature upon
our world.

Buying and selling is the life blood of the crowds' thought, its big,
brutal daily confiding to us of its view of human life. What do the
crowds, poor and rich, really believe about life? Property is the last
will and testament of Crowds.

The man-sorting that goes on in distributing and producing property is
the Crowd's most unremitting, most normal, temperamental way of
determining and selecting its most efficient and valuable leaders--its
men who can express it, and who can act for it.

This is the first reason I would give against letting the people rely on
having a House of Commons compel business men to be good.

Men who meet now and again during the year, afternoons or evenings, who
have been picked out to be at the top of the nation's talking, by a
loose absent-minded and illogical paper-process, cannot expect to
control men who have been picked out to be at the top of a nation's
buying and selling, by a hard-working, closely fitting, logical
process--the men that all the people by everything they do, every day,
all day, have picked out to represent them.

Any chance three blocks of Oxford